Face Rigs: Weight groups & mirrored shape keys

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I’ve been following along with Summer of Documentation’s “Intro to Character Animation” and reading “Stop Staring” at the same time. I’ve been looking for some info on how to create mirrored shapes for quite a bit… they’re essential for setting up a face rig for assymetrical expressions, and can be seen in all of the free rigs, like Ludwig and Mancandy.

Calvin’s tutorial pointed me in the right direction… but the left and right vertex groups should end abruptly at the middle of the face I don’t think. In Stop Staring, he describes the groups weighted so they blend into each other, so deformations including partial influences of .L and .R shapes would blend smoothly.

So… is this possible in Blender? Anyone done it already? Care to share your shape-building technique with me?

-Ryan

2

You can use vertex groups with weights applied to tell blender how much of the shape (or what vertices) to deform. If both the .L and .R side influence the middle the same way, and the two shapekeys are activated at the same time, you could end up with double the transformation in the middle. So you create a vertex group for both sides, and set the weight in the center to .5

Vertex groups can also be used to seperate the left side from the right!
Take a look at this thread: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=74733